Crecheling (20 page)

Click
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This time the sound came from right next to her, and she knew it was a pebble, hitting the ground. Was someone throwing stones at her? Or were they falling off the top of the canyon wall?

She had a terrible feeling, and she looked up—

just in time to see shadows swarming down the crack above her.

***

Chapter Twenty-One

“Jak!”

Dyan hesitated. In the near-pitch darkness, she was afraid of hitting Jak if she started laying about her with the whip. Then she heard the heavy thud of one of the bandits dropping to the earth, and she knew she was out of time.

She aimed high, way over her head. She snapped the whip, letting it ride out to its full extension straight ahead of her and up with an overhand flick of the wrist.

A scream split the darkness, followed by more thuds. Warm liquid sprayed her face, and a stinging cloud of something that might have been rock chips. She heard grunting and struggling just feet away from her in the crack, and knew it had to be Jak or Eirig wrestling with a bandit. Blind as she was, she couldn’t risk trying to help. A few inches to the wrong direction with her whip, and one of the boys might end up losing another limb. Or a head.

But she had the light stick in the pocket of her coat, and she grabbed it.

“Mother!” she heard, and “Blast you!”

Horses whinnied in surprise and panic, deeper in the crevice.

Dyan pulled out the light stick. She snapped it on.

“Ha!” Jak yelled. A bowstring twanged.

A confusion of bodies collapsed to the sand to one side of the crack. Eirig must be in there somewhere, Dyan thought. She couldn’t tell if there was one bandit on top of him, or two, and though she saw the feathered tail of an arrow protruding from the mass of flesh, she didn’t see who had been hit.

Jak crouched near the opposite wall of the crack, jittery and gray in the beam of the light stick, and he had a bow. Just as he nocked a second arrow, a bandit jumped him from the darkness. Knife held high, he plowed into Jak and knocked him to the earth.

Dyan heard motion above her before she saw it, and she drew back her whip to strike again—

a hand grabbed her wrist and yanked her back. She heard the bark and growl of dogs.

“Dyan!” Jak yelled.

Thumping sounds.

Her attacker ripped the whip from Dyan’s hand and sent it flying into the night. A hand gripped her face, stinking of sweat and filth.

She bit it, and the hand let go as a string of foul curses filled her ears. She lost her grip on the light stick. As it fell, its beam swung wildly, and Dyan saw thrashing limbs and faces twisted into snarls. She lunged forward with her head, trying to butt the bandit in the face. What she struck felt hard, but more like muscle than a skull. Then she took a punch in the jaw and fell back, lights flashing before her eyes.

“Not much good without your whip, are you, Outrider?” the man sneered. He punched Dyan again in the belly. She doubled over in pain. Her stomach hurt so much from the blow that she could barely feel the dog’s teeth that sank into her calf.

Dyan grabbed for her bola, but a hand caught her wrist.

“Only I don’t think you’re an Outrider at all.” The man dragged her to her feet and slammed her against the canyon wall. “See, I met this trapper yesterday, and he was all excited about an Outrider selling her gear to the Shoshan post. He didn’t know why an Outrider would ever want to do that, but he didn’t care, because it meant he got a fancy new set of eyewear.”

He slammed her against the wall again. She heard scuffling, and a cry. A dog bit her again.

Dyan felt stunned, the breath knocked out of her and her vision flashing. She could barely hear the words her attacker was saying, but she stared into his face from only inches away. Even in the indirect glow of the light stick’s beam, shining away from her where it lay on the ground, she recognized him. He was the man she had faced off with earlier in the day. Also, she could see that he was now wearing an Outrider’s goggles.

“He didn’t really want to part with it,” the bandit growled. “But I persuaded him.”

In the space between them, under Dyan’s chin, he held up a hooked and scalloped knife.

Dyan heard another twang, but it seemed far away and it didn’t help her. She felt herself fading, and when the bandit drew his knife arm back to swing his weapon like an ax, the only resistance she could muster was a feeble wiggle.

WHAM!

Something crashed through the darkness in front of her, huge and fast and animal. The bandit disappeared, swept away under the charge of this new thing. Dyan wondered whether there were bear in the Wahai. She slipped to her knees, dimly glad that the dogs had disappeared.

She toppled forward forever, breath shallow in her nostrils. When forever ended and she slammed cheek-first onto the sand, the force of the blow punched her eyes wide open. In the confused and dim light, she saw a flurry of hooves trampling her attacker, and above it, mounted on Outrider Lorne’s horse, Eirig.

A bow twanged again, and a scream that Dyan realized she had been hearing continuously for a minute or more cut off.

The world revolved slowly around her, the confusion calming. Two dogs barked and growled. She heard another twang of the bow, and the two growls became a single whining yip. Then a heavy crunch silenced even the yip.

The night air was cold.

“Dyan?”

She felt gentle fingers touching her throat and lips, and then Jak rolled her over onto her back and took her into his lap. “Are you awake?”

She nodded. Her vertigo and the sense that the world was a chaos of motion and darkness receded. She heard hoofbeats and then Eirig appeared.

“They’re all dead,” he announced.

Dyan felt sick. “When did the world become all about death?” she asked.

Jak shook his head. His big head blocked out the already narrow strip of stars. “It always was,” he told her. “Only we didn’t know it.”

“We’re going to need to move camp,” Eirig said. “Unless you want to sleep in puddles of blood.” He stood and started away. “I’ll gather up our stuff.”

“I don’t want to be part of it,” Dyan told Jak. “Not like this. There must be a way to live without killing all the time.”

“I agree,” Jak said. “What are you going to do about it?”

Dyan felt her calf and found torn fabric and blood. “I want to go away,” she said. “I want to go somewhere where life isn’t like this. Where people don’t have to kill each other all the time.”

“I thought Ratsnay Station was that kind of place,” Jak told her. “But I was just a kid then.”

Dyan shook her head. “We can’t go there. Our presence would put your mother’s life in danger.”

“We’ll get her later,” Jak suggested.

“I want to find a new place,” Dyan continued. “Maybe in Sayatil, or Portolan, or Satulak. A place without a System. Or if there is a System, a small one, that doesn’t kill people.”

“That doesn’t break up families,” Jak agreed.

Dyan hesitated. “That’s really what I want,” she said. “A family.”

“I’ll be your family,” Jak said instantly. “Will you be mine?”

She found his hand in the darkness and squeezed it.

Jak helped her to her feet and they surveyed the scene. With their light sticks, they found five bodies: two sliced in half, two shot with arrows, and one trampled to death by the horse. If Dyan hadn’t felt so numb, she’d have been ill.

With all the bandits accounted for, no one worried about moving the camp very far. Dyan let Jak load her into one of the saddles and lead her to a rock overhang around the bend, and there he treated her leg with supplies from the medikit. He was still checking her for other cuts and bruises when she fell asleep.

A bright, hot sun cracked her eyelids open, and Dyan was lying in a furnace. She sweated and trembled, and though she realized after a moment that she was lying in the shade of a thorn tree, the light of the sky blazed all around her, rebounding off the orange rocks of the canyons and melting her flesh.

“Water,” she rasped. Her own voice sounded ten thousand miles away.

“Ah, and the outlaw queen lives to ride another day.” Before she could actually see Eirig she felt a metal flask pressed to her lips, and cold water crashed into her mouth like a hammer. The water was too much and too cold, and she choked. Still, when Eirig pulled the bottle away, her lips, tongue, and throat felt much cooler. She also felt better for his simple presence, his shadow muting the light as he leaned over her.

“Jak?” she asked. She meant to ask a more complex and elegant question, but she didn’t feel like there was enough of her left to phrase a complete sentence.

“Jak’s looking for a better campsite,” Eirig told her. “You may have noticed that you’re not well. He and I agreed we should get you to someplace more sheltered, and off this highway of rascals.”

“Thanks, Eirig,” she managed to say.

“Jak really wanted to be the one to scout a new camp,” Eirig told her. A soft breeze ruffled his hair; it felt like sheets of ice on Dyan’s exposed skin. She realized that she was propped up lying against a saddle and was covered with a microfiber blanket. She pulled the blanket tight up under her chin. “I think he felt he owed to you. Maybe he thinks he let you down.”

Dyan shivered. “What if we got attacked while he was gone?” she managed to ask.

Eirig dismissed her worry with a snort. He held up a hand, and after her eyes took a moment to focus she saw that it was one of her bolas. “I don’t actually know how to use this,” he said, “but at least if I tried I’d put us both out of our misery quickly. Besides, I saw what you did to those robbers last night, and I have no doubt that if any of their like tried anything again, you’d make short work of them even in your sleep.”

Dyan’s laugh was weak, but genuine. “You’re a good friend, Eirig,” she said. “You can be in my family anytime.” She stretched out a boiling hand and patted Eirig softly on his knee before drifting into sleep again.

Dyan missed most of the move to a new camp. She awoke twice to find herself sitting in the saddle under a hot sun, Jak behind her and holding the reins of Lorne’s horse as it plodded along. When she woke up the third time it was night, and though the burning in her skin had passed, her throat felt like she had swallowed acres of sand.

She patted around in the darkness and found that she was lying against a saddle again. She grabbed the horn of it and pulled herself into a sitting position. Her entire body trembled and ached and the muscles of her arms felt like loose strings.

“Water,” she heard a voice. She was surprised to realize it wasn’t hers.

It was Jak. Moonlight shining down on them both revealed him sitting beside her, holding out a water flask. She took it and drank.

“Thank you.”

“Eirig made a sort of soup by boiling dried meat,” he said. “It’s not as disgusting as you might think.”

She nodded, and he passed over a small metal cup, warm to the touch. She drank, found she could only handle a few sips of the salty broth, and set it aside.

“Where are we?”

“We didn’t go far at all,” he told her. “This little canyon has one great virtue, which is that it is hard to find and hard to get into. I think we managed to get up in here without leaving tracks.”

“What are its vices?”

“Don’t worry about its vices,” Jak said. “That’s
my
job.”

“What’s
my
job?”

He took the cup of soup and moved it away from the nest of blankets on which she lay. “Your job is to go to sleep,” he said.

She nodded and lay back down again. She watched Jak watching her, and beyond him a shadowy recess that might be an overhang of stone, and below him a stand of trees, waving back and forth in the moonlight like the five fingers of a twitching silvery hand.

Dyan awoke again and this time found herself alone. Her skin felt fragile as a paper, crispy to the touch and warm, but she was able to wobble to her feet. If the boys had abandoned her, they had left all the gear behind; one saddle was on the ground, and blankets rolled roughly and stacked against the stone base of the overhand, and cooking gear, food and medikits. The canyon was short and boxy, with high walls and a stand of trees in the center of it. One of the horses cropped at tall grass growing around the trees.

She felt thirsty and looked around for a water bottle. She was unsteady on her feet, but in a couple of minutes of staggering around, she was able to dig all through the equipment. No flasks, no waterskins.

She checked the canyon again.

“That’s the vice,” she said to herself. “No water.”

Jak and Eirig had gone to get water, that had to be it. They’d taken one of the horses, because there were lots of water bottles. Looking around the canyon, though, Dyan felt alone. The walls loomed impossibly tall about her and she felt sick. She had lost everything and everyone, except Jak and Eirig, and now she might be losing them, too.

She’d go down the canyon, she resolved. She checked herself over. She was dressed in her Outrider garb, other than her bare feet and a bandage wrapped around one calf. She pulled on her boots and found her weapons, tucking them gingerly into place. She double-checked the campsite to be sure she hadn’t missed any water containers. Finding none, she bent to pick up the saddle.

It was too heavy; she couldn’t lift it.

“Holy Mother,” she murmured.

She sat down on the saddle, light-headed. She should wait. They’d be back. There was no sign of violence, and the idea that the two of them might have ridden off together on one horse, abandoning her, was ridiculous. If they wanted her dead, they’d have taken both horses. If they wanted her alive, they’d have left water bottles.

They were coming back.

But she couldn’t wait.

Wincing at each step and keeping her hand by her belt and the whip that hung there, she shuffled out of the canyon.

The top of the canyon, by the campsite, was a box with earth, trees, and grass in it. The exit from the back led into a long sluice of rounded orange stone. A channel dug through the bottom of the sluice, but it was dry. It had probably been carved by run-off water during millennia of rainstorms, Dyan thought, or maybe there had once been a spring and it had dried up. The sun pounded on her from above, and pounded off the rock on which she walked, hammering her a second time in the face.

The sluice turned and wound around a tower of red rock, then struck into what looked like a much larger canyon, on a shelf above the level of the floor. There she saw Jak and almost cried out in relief—